Who do you trust for game reviews?

Back in the days when ENWorld was young, I used to rely very heavily on TechTV's X-Play for all of my gaming review needs. I pretty much look to the early days of X-Play as the pinnacle of game reviews for 3 key reasons:

1) The individual reviews accurately covered both the positive an negative aspects of each video game. It covered the initial reaction, game length playability, and replayability of games. It discussed games in terms of their own genre, commenting on whether it would be suitable for hardcore fans or more casual gamers. It was not afraid to pan high profile companies.

2) I enjoyed the humor, and was in tune with it's cultural references.

3) It's x/5 star rating system was used very accurately to describe how a game performed overall, compared to all others (1 was the lowest, 3 average, and 5 the highest). The reviewers had a large knowledge base of games, and were very capable of judging what was truly "innovative" or "smooth" or "high quality graphics" compared to the rest of the market. The most important part of this system was the cold, hard truth that a vast majority of games deserve a 3/5. As a long time gamer, I believe that X-Play is the first game reviewer I ever read/watched that understood the fact that, in the long run, almost all games that you play will be simply average, and not overly memorable as good or bad. It takes something very significant to make a game stand out enough to even merit a 4, and a 5 was a rare and beautiful gem that might change the history of gaming, get you addicted for hours, or simply make you stand back and marvel at the awesomeness. Likewise, a 2 was a very flawed game, and a 1 was almost unplayable.

Over the last four or more years, X-Play has slipped dramatically in its ethos as a competent game reviewer. It started with more generic reviews, and has culmanated with their current state of being where 9/15 games in the last month have gotten a 4/5 rating. It spends way too much time focusing on developers and previews. The show itself has changed format so dramatically that it is now practically Attack of the Show Part 2, and is pretty much unwatchable.

And so I ask you: where can a guy go these days to get a decent review of video games? Many major publications are puppets for the production companies, and I have yet to find one that I consider accurate on a regular basis. Fan-based sites are full of fanboys, haters, idiots, and infants who skew the data and make their ratings too unreliable. What websites, organizations, TV shows, or magazines can you recommend to me that will meet the criteria 1 and 3 above? If you had to occasionally but a game without renting and testing it first, who would you trust for accurate information on it?

Commercially? No one. While I've no doubt that there are some reviewers who review games thoroughly and ethically, I feel the vast majority do not. The problem is two-fold, in my opinion. First, since it's a job, reviewers are forced to get reviews out as soon as possible. Often this results in incomplete or rushed gameplay, which is not indicative of how normal people play. Second, there seems to be a lot of shady stuff going on in the background. In general, there's a lot of pressure from publishers to review games well. After all, that's where a lot of money comes from, as well as the ability to review games early. Making reviews a business is a bias that is extraordinarily difficult to ignore.

Now, non-commercially, that's a different story. I generally agree with Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation... though of late I think he's been a little off the mark. I'll generally take a look at the reviews on Gamefaqs for console games, keeping in mind that they're extremely biased and relatively poor quality in the good reviews (the poor reviews generally have to argue their points, making them more informative). Still, looking over the highs and lows generally paints a pretty good picture of the game.

Honestly though, my number one source is my brother. We have very similar tastes in games, and though we don't always agree 100%, if he says a game is good or bad, I'll trust him on it.

It used to gamespot.com. I typically compared their review to the overly enthusiastic and forgiving IGN review and went from there. I still read their reviews but don't put nearly as much stock in them after the the Jeff Gerstmann fiasco and Greg Kasavin leaving the site (not to mention many of the other editors they worked with) has taken a few steps back in quality.

Giantbomb.com is fair and has plenty of opinions to go around not to mention lots of the former gamespot.com employees working their and producing material.

"Trust"? None.

However, I will read IGN's reviews with the distinct understanding that their reviews are, as John Crichton put it, "overly enthusiastic and forgiving" in many instances, and overly jaded in others (like their RPG reviews).

I'll also watch X-Play and Reviews on the Run to hear what they say about it, with the understanding that AFAIC they're wrong almost all of the time.

Some of the slightly non-mainstream sites are. . . OK-ish at times. But honestly, I tend to trust the impressions and judgements of certain people on certain forums (mostly local-ish ones) above all. Well, above all except friends IRL. Not that we always agree on any given thing, but I know they haven't been paid to spout BS, and none of them is trying to sell me anything, directly or otherwise. And this also applies to said folks on perhaps three forums total.

Trust issues? Oh yeah, we gots dem. How many you want?

If you had to occasionally buy a game without renting and testing it first, who would you trust for accurate information on it?

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Trust No One. I use reviews to determine what i might rent, but only Halo 4 or a licensed Urusei*Yatsura port might get me to buy a game untested. [ Final fantasy, Zelda and Metriod used to be on my must-buy list but left the list for a few reasons]

Look at as many reviews as possible, especially user reviews. One lone duchebag harping on a feature shouldn't turn you off a game automatically, but sometimes its worth looking at other reviews to see if others agree.

I might use gamespot as a one stop review site, but that entails looking through a good chunk of user reviews.

I watch X-Play, read Gamespot.com and GameFaqs.com and will also go to gamerankings.com or ign.com if I really want another review.

X-Play does suck now, but Adam and Morgan can still give you a decent idea of a game. They're familiar enough that we already know their gaming biases and they will still trash a game. It seems to me that since the last format change, they've been reviewing less D-tier and lower games, which would lead to higher scores. AND I know from experience that in the last 2-3 years, B and C level games have gotten MUCH better, which will also lead to higher reviews.

Gamespot.com has pretty decent reviews, however, they've been busted at least once for catering reviews to their advertisers, so a lot of people won't trust ANYTHING they say. However, I think that as long as you realize their scale ONLY goes from 6-10, with 6 being unplayable, you can use them without any issues.

IGN.com tends to provide reviews on the same high-end 6-10 scale, but it has always felt to me that most of their reviewers have very specific tastes, and that makes the reviews a little odd.

Gamerankings.com usually gathers reviews from other sites, like Rotten Tomatoes does for movies.

Gamefaqs.com provides reviews from REAL people (teenagers) so a lot will be mindless, but if you read a couple of high scores, a couple of middle scores and a couple of lower scores, you should have a good idea of what youre ACTUALLY getting.

Probably picking a few different sources is your best bet. I often read Gamespot, they're ok, but they cover a wide variety of games and the reviewers don't always share my tastes. They also tend to rate a game by whatever the current standards are, so remakes of games that were great in the past end up getting somewhat mediocre reviews because the graphics and sound might not be up to what they consider par. I'd say they put too much focus on style to detriment of substance sometimes. Still, I tend to get a first impression from Gamespot when I'm curious about a game.

Game Spy is another site I'll tend to read. Their reviews are ok I guess, I don't really hang around there on a regular basis, but I use them as a second opinion.

GameFAQs is really hit or miss because it's non-professional reviews. So yeah there are teenagers there who basically give a game they like a 10 and a game they don't like a 1. Of course in the review they might have numbers that don't result in an arithmetic mean of their score either. Anyway, my advice if to ignore the reviews for big popular series like Final Fantasy, Zelda, Mario, Halo, or whatever because there's going to be dozens of reviews of varying quality. Even if it's one of the recommended reviews, the reviewer might sinply not like the game at all and be going out of the way to just pan it even if it's good. I've actually done a handful of reviews there for some old and obscure games, and I try to be objective.

Metacritic's good if I want more opinions. So if a mainstream site pans something like an RPG, I'll look for a site that covers RPGs in detail where it might be reviewed by someone who has a better appreciation for the game and who may be more honest about a game's strengths and weaknesses.

You know I still miss PC-XL

Thanks for the replies everyone. I find the lack of trust across the industry pretty unsettling, but there's not much I can do about it. Gamerankings seem to link to a lot of smaller reviewers, which should give a lot more rounded reviews that the big guys. That may turn into my new default site.

Trust No One. I use reviews to determine what i might rent, but only Halo 4 or a licensed Urusei*Yatsura port might get me to buy a game untested. [ Final fantasy, Zelda and Metriod used to be on my must-buy list but left the list for a few reasons]

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Generally, I agree that renting before buying is good. But a cost of $5-7 to rent a game means I'm spending a much larger amount of money on goodness-insurance than I like. Since I tend to sporatically play for long amounts of time, rather than having a gaming schedule like I used to, GameFly or the Blockbuster Game Pass are not good options for me.

It seems to me that since the last format change, they've been reviewing less D-tier and lower games, which would lead to higher scores. AND I know from experience that in the last 2-3 years, B and C level games have gotten MUCH better, which will also lead to higher reviews.

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Sorry, I just don't buy it. They've taken down a lot of their old reviews, which makes it hard to show you specific examples of the inflation, but a couple are pretty obvious. The sheer number of 5s that they hand out now would have been impossible under their old system; Spore and Assassin's Creed are the most notably inflated scores. Giving Big Bang Mini, a very gimicky and limited play DS game, a 4/5 this year is another one that stands out as something that would have gotten a very obvious 3 when the DS first came out.

And more importantly, we all know that graphics are going to get better over time, and more complex games will be released as the latest generation of consoles matures. But the average game is still the average game. If you look at the number of same-genre games (sports games, WWII games, racing games, etc) that Xplay (and other sites) gives 5/5 or 4/5, you'll realize that there is simply no way all of those games will be memorable when they are all so similar. A high rating used to mean something truly stood out, now it just seems to mean "acceptable".

It's also worth noting that reviewing the lower tier games and finding the diamonds in the rough was also a nice feature of the old Xplay. Just reviewing the same top-selling games as everyone else really dulls their edge.